


The Road Beneath the Snow

by davaia



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: After Naboo, Angst, M/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Pre-Slash, Recovery, better known as 'Naboohoo', don't question space physics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-09 03:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11095527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/davaia/pseuds/davaia
Summary: Theed’s Holy of Holies lies on the outskirts of the palace grounds—a memorial grove filled with sacred, glass-petaled chime trees. One for each life come and gone.Fill for the three-word Tumblr prompt challenge. Set in a tiny, tiny AU.





	The Road Beneath the Snow

**Author's Note:**

> This one will be familiar if we're Tumblr-buds! I posted it back in January as a fill for O.E.'s three-word prompt of "museum, exhalation, glasses." I really liked how this little scene turned out, so I'm finally putting it up on here. A follow-up (for Saner's prompt) is in the works!
> 
> Originally written to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3fUdizGep4&t=153s) and [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgFnWUfCDX0), played at the same time.  
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> *****  
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Theed’s Holy of Holies lies on the outskirts of the palace grounds—a memorial grove filled with sacred, glass-petaled chime trees. One for each life come and gone. A museum for Naboo’s noble dead that lives and breathes, thriving atop ashes and inhumations alike. 

The air is clear, still, and tastes clean—it had been grey for so long, thick and greasy with ash as the city’s funeral pyres burned for a week straight. It’s quiet here now, and the place is nearly empty of mourners for the first time in days. The tree Obi-Wan stands beneath is young, the dark soil at its base is freshly packed around a slab of white marble inscribed with only a name. 

Chime trees are rare and exquisitely beautiful, but that’s not why they’re sacred. 

Obi-Wan cups his hands and leans in close to the nearest, low branch. He blows gently in one soft, sustained exhalation—and the heat of his breath alone is enough to set the brittle, blush-colored fronds into motion. One leaf quivers, begins to spin in slow, lazy circles, clinking against its neighbors until they, too, take up movement in a ghostly chain reaction. Along slender twigs and branches, spreading up and outward through the lush, vitreous-pink crown, the chime tree shivers into life—and it _sings_. 

The tree sings to him with the beautiful, catastrophic dissonance of a hundred thousand tiny, shattering glasses.  

It’s a basic matter of thermal physics–a calculation of heat flux and temperature difference and transfer coefficients that, on Naboo, simply translates into _the breath of one becomes the breath of all_. Obi-Wan closes his eyes and listens, silent and reverential. It’s a sound he hopes to hear in his dreams tonight, instead of the bone-shaking vibrations of Theed’s power generator. 

Eventually, off to his right, the grass stirs in time with the halting _shuffle-thump_ gait he supposes he’ll just have to relearn now. 

Obi-Wan looks up quickly, out of the corner of his eye. Just long enough to see that the newcomer looks like a scraggly, dead tree that looms grossly out of place here. He’s immediately disgusted with himself for the intrusive thought. 

"You shouldn’t be walking yet," the young knight calls out. "And certainly not alone." 

Qui-Gon comes to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him, leaning heavily on the forearm crutch in his right hand. "I’m not," he says mildly, indicating with a tip of his head. At the far edge of the grove, his companion med-droid—its vocal unit muffled with medical tape—lurches off to one side, vegetative. Its disassembled power unit dangles out the back. 

Obi-Wan rolls his eyes, because even the lingering trauma of battle is no match for his inborn sense of propriety. " _Don’t_ be troublesome, Master." 

Qui-Gon smiles, placid. "Far too late for that, my young apprentice." 

It’s an easy, slip-of-the-tongue endearment, and it hits Obi-Wan like a crack across the face. He nudges his toe into the overturned dirt at the base of the tree, silent for a long moment. The elder Jedi gives him space for his thoughts, expectant but unhurried. 

"This one was your grave," Obi-Wan finally says. "Gifted to you from the royal house of Naboo, for an honorable death in its service." 

Qui-Gon shifts on his feet, nods once in understanding, and pulls his robe tighter around his body. He breathes in deeply, for the sake of tasting the sweet, fresh air after weeks in the medbay—and then breathes out slowly to diffuse the resultant working-pain of his mangled lung. "I wouldn’t mind dying in a place like this," he remarks, and digs his toes into the grass. 

Obi-Wan flinches. "Please don’t say that." 

There’s a tiny ignition of worry from Qui-Gon, and the feeling curls like smoke between them in the Force. It’s the Master’s turn for silence. Slowly, palpably, he begins to realize that he’s come upon something much different than a man paying his respects to Theed’s fallen. That _smiling_ and _attendant_  and _Congratulations, Knight Kenobi, you have done well_ have nothing to do with _being_ well.  

"…Forgive me." 

Obi-Wan huffs out a strange, short laugh and braces himself against the tree, nearly brought low by two words for a poor turn of phrase. He fears, briefly and madly, that he’ll lose himself and sink to his knees entirely, never to get up again. But, no—the Force would never be so cruel, he thinks, to require the sort of balance where he must fall so that Qui-Gon Jinn may stand. 

"Obi-Wan," Qui-Gon pleads. "Padawan. Look at me." 

Obi-Wan doesn’t. "A resting place here is an honor afforded to very few," he explains quietly, then smooths his fingertips over the tree’s peeling, snowy-white bark. "There was no shortage of those upon which to bestow it." He shakes his head to clear it, then pushes himself upright. "The space didn’t go to waste. It belongs to Yané now." 

"Why won’t you look at me?" 

Because he’s not the man’s padawan anymore, and because he already knows what he’ll see—Qui-Gon, _thin-thin-thin_ , grey-faced and stooped with exhaustion and newfound chronic pain. His beard is overgrown and his hair is down because he doesn’t have the mobility or dexterity to fix it himself anymore. Beneath his Jedi robe he’s still wearing his med-tunics, and very likely those flimsy slippers that look spitefully comical on a man of his rank and manner. It’s _wrong_ , and it’s too much for Obi-Wan to bear in this of all places. 

"I’m really quite alright," he says, too tired for anything other than a graceless deflection. 

Qui-Gon exhorts him the only way he knows will work. "Then do it for my sake." 

Obi-Wan is so new to knighthood that he can’t disobey a direct request like that. He stiffly folds his arms into his sleeves and turns to face the older man. Neutral. Obedient. Composed. He doesn’t resist when Qui-Gon takes his face in one large, bony hand and tips it up, stroking his thumb over the tiny mole on his right cheekbone. 

The lines of Qui-Gon’s eyes are filled with sadness as he gazes downward. "You’re allowed to grieve, Obi-Wan." 

Obi-Wan is staring at his chin, stubborn and tight-jawed. "For what? My braid?" 

The joke is frail and bitter, a last-ditch effort to avert the terrible self-revelation Qui-Gon has backed him into. It only makes the moment worse, and Obi-Wan seems to realize that just after the words leave his mouth. He bites down on the inside of his cheek, hard. 

Qui-Gon shakes his head and his expression sinks deeper into heartbreak. "For anything you need to, Padawan." 

He raises his eyes to meet Qui-Gon’s, and the spiderweb-fractures inside Obi-Wan finally give way. When he breaks, what’s exposed within him is not so much grief as it is  _desolation_. A bleak and scoured chasm that had once been home to the kinder pieces of Qui-Gon Jinn—the ones which Obi-Wan had fought and scraped so hard for, for so long, and tucked away so carefully. 

All of it wasted wholesale by a Sith, a slave child, and a short-sighted old fool. 

This quiet, black emptiness is enough to undo him, too. Qui-Gon would willingly, stoically abide the weight of his own wounds, but he’ll never, _never_ allow the same of his padawan. He drops his crutch and doesn’t embrace Obi-Wan so much as _subsume_ him. He pulls the young knight into the protective, wiry frame of his own body, wraps him up in the warm depths of his robe. 

"Oh, my Obi-Wan," Qui-Gon whispers down into soft, auburn hair. "I’m here. I’m still here. I haven’t left you." 

_Padawan, Padawan, Padawan…_ he’ll say it over and over, he thinks, and keep them locked in this place until that hollowed-out space within Obi-Wan is full again. 

Obi-Wan bumps his forehead into Qui-Gon’s chest, blinks and stares down at his master’s ridiculous, knobby toes poking out of their too-small shoes. "Your feet…" he whispers, overcome but dry-eyed, into the folds of brown cloth. 

The wind picks up around them, bolstering the dying notes of Obi-Wan’s breath in the branches high above, setting the chime tree into motion anew. Qui-Gon smooths his hand up and down the back of Obi-Wan’s bent head, picks a frail, glassy leaf out of his hair. "They’re just slippers. Nothing more," he murmurs. "Nothing more."


End file.
